This year I managed to catch a solstice sunset at a stone circle for the first time since the late 90s.
Not many people there—the residual paganism of the Swedes tends more toward showy maypoles and folk-songs about tiny frogs—but that suited me just fine. A chance to think and reflect on the turning of the year, and of history.
I’m gonna quote this bit from John Higgs not for its originality—various people, me included, have been saying the same thing for months or even years—but for its succinctness:
Recovering our attention from the networks is not going to be easy. Parts of the digital world are still valuable and becoming entirely analogue is pretty much impossible at the moment, especially when your livelihood depends on it. But even at a time when you can’t tell truth from lies, you can feel it in your body when you’re being poisoned. You can feel your quality of life deteriorate, as you watch the Overton window sink lower and lower. We’ve probably all lost people to the online delusion, increasingly convinced that the fake online world matters. ‘So-and-so has fallen’, is a common way of expressing this. And even if parts of social media can be fixed – that’s not happening at the moment. This just leaves walking away.
It’s over. The system itself hasn’t changed much; for all the light-not-heat over Those Two Letters, that’s merely an intensification of a fifteen-year paradigm of manipulation. What has changed is how people are talking about this stuff; with the exception of a few serious Kool-Aid devotees, who are almost always direct beneficiaries of the gravy-train, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone with anything good to say about “the internet” these days.
Certainly, the conflation of social media with that (always-already nebulous and inaccurate) broader sociotechnological construct serves to throw out some number of babies with the stinking, shitty bathwater—and that is perhaps to be regretted. But then again, the shoving of algorithms and dark patterns into every damned thing has been a deliberate decision, the city’s aquifer poisoned on the direct command of its self-appointed aristocracy.
The tower is falling—and I honestly can’t say I’m sorry to see it happen.
The wheel is turning, and many waves of change are peaking at once. As the darkness gathers, it’s hard to see where the light might be coming from… so perhaps all that remains is to try to be that light yourself.
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